Introduction
The last few decades have brought great change to professions with very long histories. New professions have formed and are thriving, while others struggle to maintain a healthy membership and relevant role in society. In this article we will examine geospatial professionals in the recent past, the present, and the near future. As part of this examination we will briefly consider the following topics:
- The way geospatial professionals are trained and educated.
- The way these professions collaborate and interact with each other, with other professions and trades, and with the public.
- The way geospatial professionals execute their respective crafts or skills.
- How individual geospatial professionals and the organizations that employ them need to prepare for trends that will be shaping the geospatial industry in the near future.
Who are Geospatial Professionals?
The term “geospatial professional” could have many different meanings. Before we get into the thick of this article let’s define the term for our purposes.
Geospatial is a word we will define as data with a spatial component that typically represents a feature or phenomenon on, above, or below the Earth’s surface.
Professional is a term we will define as an individual engaged in the serious study and practice of a particular skill craft or endeavor and who possesses the following traits:
- A focus on improving their practice of the endeavor.
- A desire to improve the practice of the endeavor by fellow professionals.
- A duty to protect the health, safety and welfare of the public.
- A duty to protect the interests of their clients or organizations they serve.
- Adherence to a high moral and ethical standard in the practice of their endeavor.
With the an understanding of those two (2) words, we can then define a geospatial professional as any professional that collects, creates, manages, manipulates, styles, or presents geospatial data.
Questions to Answer
This article will try to answer the following questions:
- What will geospatial professionals of the future look like?
- How will they be different from geospatial professionals of the past?
- How have geospatial professionals been challenged by recent technology changes?
- What technology trends have the potential to be the most disruptive to geospatial professionals as we move into the future?
- What can you do as an organization to prepare for these changes and recruit the best talent?
- What skills do you need to acquire as a geospatial professional to prepare for the future?
Changes in the Recent Past and Present
The last few decades have brought great changes to geospatial professionals. Many of these changes are part of larger ongoing trends that geospatial professionals are trying to adapt to. Let's consider the changes in the three (3) areas we mentioned previously:
- Education.
- Collaboration and Interaction with others.
- Execution of their trade or craft.
Changes in Education
We will begin with the changes to education. There has been a push to mandate education or to increase the educational requirements for geospatial professionals, especially for those professionals licensed and regulated by the government. This push has included changing state laws and creating new academic programs at colleges and universities.
While this push for more education is occurring, academic institutions are trying to adapt to many changes themselves. They are working to decide which of the old skill sets are no longer needed, which current skill sets should be the focus of their programs, and which should be the focus of their programs in the future. They often struggle to “fit in” all the education needed to provide the broad and deep knowledge needed by the geospatial professionals they are training. At the same time rising tuition costs put the education they offer beyond the reach of more and more potential students. In response to these pressures, some colleges and universities are trying to make their instruction available remotely by means of the internet, and some even tailor their programs for working professionals.
Changes in Collaboration and Interaction
The internet has greatly increased the potential for collaboration among geospatial professionals. It has never been easier to connect individuals from around the world that share similar interests. In many cases these connections result in the formation of teams that come together to accomplish real work and solve challenging problems.
Despite this increased potential for collaboration, some of the traditional organizations that serve the interests of geospatial professionals struggle to remain relevant and maintain their membership rolls. The American Congress of Surveying and Mapping is an example of an organization that has seen its membership continuing to decrease over the last couple of decades. It remains a challenge for these traditional organizations to skillfully employ the internet to tap into resources offered by scattered individuals with an interest in their mission.
Other organizations, both non-profits and governments, are not prepared to take advantage of geospatial professionals that want to volunteer their skills. Oftentimes the more skilled the volunteer, the harder it is to find an organization that can fully utilize the volunteer’s skills.
Changes in the Execution of Craft and Trade
The greatest changes have occurred in the way geospatial professionals execute their trade or craft. For the sake of simplicity, we will organize these changes into two (2) broad categories. In the first category we group advances in equipment and technology related to the acquisition of spatial data. In the second category we group advances in computing. We will discuss both categories.
Advances in the Equipment and Technology Used To Acquire Geospatial Data
A large industry has grown to support the high-tech business of providing geospatial professionals with tools to acquire or collect geospatial data. This industry is no longer dominated by individual instrument makers practicing their craft in small shops. Instead global corporations with fingers in multiple aspects of geospatial data collection are the key players shaping the direction spatial data acquisition will take in the future.
The advances we’ve seen in the technology used to acquire geospatial data include the development of Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) and their related technologies. The premier GNSS is the Global Position System (GPS) funded and administered by the United States Federal Government. However, GNSS has proved so valuable and revolutionary that we now see other satellite systems like the Euorpean Union's Galileo, Russia's GLONASS, and China's Compass satellite systems becoming players in the GNSS arena. GNSS signals are being supplemented by supporting satellite systems like WAAS in the United States, Michibiki in Japan, India's GAGAN and even systems maintained by private companies, like John Deere's StarFire. More than any other single combination of technology, GNSS has made it possible to acquire the location of people and things cheaply and easily.
Advances in remote sensing have included new types of remotely sensed data, such as LIDAR. We've also seen the launch of powerful remote sensing satellites. The quality, resolution, frequency and types of data available from remote sensing have all improved. For example: The Fall 2010 Issue of Imaging Notes Magazine described the remote sensing satellite system operated by the company Rapid Eye. The five (5) satellites in this system have the capacity to capture 1.5 million square miles every day. That is an area equal to the land mass east of the Missouri River in the contiguous United States. The library of data from this system is already over one (1) billion square kilometers, or seven (7) times the land mass of Earth. It is now possible to acquire, for no charge or a very small fee, fairly current 3 foot resolution raster data for most of the Continental United States. In urban areas higher resolution raster data is often available in the public domain. I know of a small land surveying company that recently acquired 1 foot resolution aerial photography of an area covering several counties for just a few thousand dollars. This abundance of raster data is likely the second most powerful reason why it has become cheaper and easier to acquire geospatial data.
Advances have also come to the land surveying industry, allowing for more efficient collection of terrestrial land surveying data. The last (twenty) 20 years brought the use of GNSS in land surveying, elimination the need for line-of-sight in the execution of surveys. In just the last decade land surveying has seen the arrival of digital levels, reflectorless electronic distance meters that need no prism, robotic total stations, and terrestrial laser scanners.
These advances in GNSS, remote sensing, and terrestrial geospatial data acquisition have made it much less expensive to obtain geospatial data. We will consider the impacts of this trend in later in the article.
Advances in Computing
In the second category of changes related to the way geospatial professionals execute their crafts or trades we group advances related to the computer.
The arrival of the computer as a platform for geospatial tasks has been a relatively recent development. The first successful high-level programming language arrived only a little over 60 years ago. Since its arrival, the computer has become smaller, more powerful, and cheaper. Programming languages have become easier to learn, easier to use, and programming language tools have become less expensive.
The computer has allowed a huge migration from paper records to digital records in the geospatial arena. For example: When was the last time you purchased a paper map of any type? We can now access high-quality street maps online, download filed surveying maps from our local County web site, access real property deeds from the local Clerk and Recorder’s web site, and obtain digital USGS quadrangle maps from federal government GIS data portals, and view flood hazard maps online using tools from FEMA.
The software running on our computers have also impacted the geospatial industry. The power of personal computing has made it possible for organizations of all sizes to implement geographic information systems. These systems allow powerful spatial analysis and map-making on desktop computers. It is now possible to create and edit geospatial data in the field using your mobile phone. User friendly geographic software like Google Earth have increased public awareness of geospatial data and analysis. They have allowed the layman to easily view geospatial data.
Computers have increased the connectedness of our world. This connectedness makes it possible to gather geospatial data from real time sensor networks and to send geospatial data to land surveying field crews on the job site from the office. More and more devices, like are cars, our phones, and our home cooling systems, are connected to the internet and providing data about themselves. This data often includes the objects location or other geospatial information.